Beat the Odds, Burn the Gas: Two Successful Pronghorn Hunts

Foreign. To the Hunt west podcast, here's your host, Jaden Bales. Hey, before we get into this week's episode, do you remember when buying an Idaho tag felt kind of like you're trying to win a concert ticket to see Taylor Swift? I mean, not like I've ever done that, but basically you'd wake up early, the system would crash, and you'd stare at a spinning queue for hours and hours on end just to not get a tag. Well, Idaho nuked that dumpster fire of a queue system and the game has completely changed with their over the counter draw that is happening this December. That's why on November 5th at 6pm Mountain time, I'm hosting an Idaho webinar with limited spots. It's 47 bucks a seat and in this webinar you'll learn what's changed, how to develop a good tag strategy, which parts of the state have been selling out fastest, and how you can pick good units that match your style, not just the ones that everyone says are good on the Internet. If you'd like to grab a spot, you can learn more information at the Show Notes or go to huntwestplanning.com and it should be right there at the header. All right, let's get into this week's show. What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Hunt West Podcast. I'm happy you're here, so thanks for tuning in. I know a lot of you guys have reached out to me and said that you're enjoying the podcast or I even ran into somebody out in the field this week who is a listener and I just really appreciate you being here and tuning in whenever we're publishing these podcasts. I hope that these things are helping you plan your hunts better, enjoy your hunts more, be a better western hunter and just enjoy this whole process. So I just appreciate you being here and as long as you guys keep reaching out telling me you like the podcast and or asking for different suggestions of what to talk about, we'll keep it coming. So thank you, really appreciate it. I'm road dogging it again on this episode solo round and I just dropped my my friend Kane off at the airport in Wyoming and I'm driving home and I just was wanting to record some thoughts down, talk a little bit about application strategy as you all are thinking about wyoming pronghorn in 2026 and tell you a good pronghorn story while we're at it. I think it's going to be helpful to set the stage with our application strategy for this because I gotta admit, I screwed it up. I did not do a good job with our application strategy going into this season and we still made the best of it. We still ended up with a great hunt and. And Kane lucked out, ended up with the tag he wanted to. But I think it's kind of fun to talk about how tags are changing. Tag draws and trends are always evolving and just it's getting so popular that having a multi state strategy and having a long term plan is just so important. I think this is a good illustrator of that point. So to give you some background here, my friend Kane and I have been friends for 25 years. We have grown up together. We grew up turkey hunting in northeast Oregon. His grandpa who raised him had a lot of, had a good chunk of ground and hunted a whole lot. He was one of the most successful archery elk hunters I ever met growing up. He was a tree stand elk hunter who basically just spent days and days out there getting to learn the elk, running trail cameras in the early 2000s and like really just being obsessed with it. And he had a huge impact on how much we loved hunting and fishing and, and we got to basically have free reign of the couple hundred acres that they had up against the national forest and would go trap and shoot birds and turkey hunt and deer hunt and do stuff on their place when I was a kid. So Kane and I have a long history of, of getting into some hunts and having good stories to tell afterwards. So this year was going to be no different. No doubt. Back in 2022, Kane came out and had a whitetail hunt with me. We shot four whitetail, he shot two does and a buck. I shot a doe on that trip and it was just an awesome, awesome time. Whenever King comes out, he's really interested in making sure that he maximizes his meat haul, which I really appreciate about him. He's not big trophy guy and he just wants to make sure that we have a great time and then he's going to bring home as much meat in his coolers as he, as he possibly can. Which I'll maybe comment on that here. In the end, maybe could have done a little bit smarter packing on his meat getting home this trip. But hey, that's all right. We'll, we'll talk about that when it comes time. About a year ago, Kane and his lady had a, a little boy. So Kane now is also. It's really important to him even now or more so now that he brings home the bacon, so to speak, whenever he goes on these hunting trips. So when we were looking at our application strategy, we essentially were trying to nail down an area where he could get a pronghorn buck tag, maybe some nearby pronghorn doe tags, and some whitetail doe tags to go with the trip. In Wyoming, the doe applications are separate from the buck applications, completely random, and oftentimes you can get multiple tags for a species in the doe pool. So we essentially built his application strategy around that. Now, he had come into this this season with four points, and for the most part, I always instruct folks when you're applying for tags to make sure that you are going to have plenty of points for the tag that you're going for. Like, don't feel like. Don't feel like you're losing out on something if you're leaving one or two or three points on the table when you know that the unit that you're putting in for has what you're looking for, and it has all the characteristics to have the kind of hunt that you want to hunt. So Kane, not being a big trophy guy, I think the main idea was, let's make sure there's, like, decent enough public access so we can look over some pronghorn and enjoy our time. Maybe not manage the private public boundaries quite as much as on a lower point tag. But having the biggest antelope on the wall wasn't his biggest goal either. When we were looking at the different units, I had set my sights for both of us on this one tag that had some pretty low public access, but there was some access areas, and I know that the hunter success was pretty good there, and that was kind of what we were looking at. But when the time came to actually put in for applications, I noticed that a few units had increased the amount of tags that they were offering. So being a gambler, man that I am, I figured we should go throw in on these units. That might have been a stretch. He had four points, and the unit he put in for went for five the year before at a lower total tag number. I crunched some numbers, and I was like, all right, man, if you put in for this, you know, it should. With the same amount of applicants as last year, it should be the same. It should make it so you can draw with four points. Boy, I was just freaking wrong. I just was looking at the draw results, just to recap and refresh my memory. And Kane got flipping lucky. So in 2025, no, 2024, it was 100% draw with five preference points. They increased the tags quite a bit in 2025, and it still crept up a full point. It took six to guarantee it. And that means Kane got his tag in the random draw in Wyoming, which was only 7% odds. So the dude is freaking lucky and he beat the odds. And luckily we were still able to go out and have this great hunt. But I will say, like, I got that call wrong. And I think it just goes to show, even when you're running the math of, like, what if applicants stay the same, you know, what if they increase a little bit? I think it just at this stage in the game, you got to play a conservative if you're wanting to force a draw in a state like a Colorado, Wyoming or Oregon, where their preference point states, the people with the most points get preference in the draw. The random element obviously saved Kane's bacon when it came to Wyoming, but at the end of the day, he probably shouldn't have had that tag, which I didn't realize until after he already drew when the draw results came out. So this unit that he ended up in, it had about 30% public land, which on the western scale is pretty low amount of public land. However, there's just plenty of goats out there and we knew it was going to be a good experience. I will say this, though. I hunted that unit with a bunch of other friends in 2019, and in 2019, it took two points, two preference points to guarantee the draw in the regular pool. This year it took six. So if you're doing the math, we're six years in advance, six years down the road, and it's jumped four preference points. It takes four more years than it did six years ago to get this tag that Kane had. Pretty crazy how. How things change. So on my side of the application, I kind of got shiny object syndrome, and I wanted to put in for a tag, a brand new tag in Wyoming, thinking that it was going to be really good drawing odds and I was going to be able to, you know, trophy hunt it. For lack of a better term, go find a really special buck that would be really unique. I haven't really shot a big pronghorn yet, and I thought that maybe a new tag that in a. In a unit that I know produces good pronghorn would. Would turn that up for me and give me the best opportunity to draw that tag. Right. Well, I must say I was dead wrong there. The drawing odds were really poor and I didn't get that tag. But as a backup, I put Kane's unit down, knowing that again with my math, there was a chance that with a Tag increase. I could get it second choice. Well, I kind of missed on that one, too. For a tag that was 100% in the random draw tr draw for residents, I put it down as a second choice where, lucky for me, I only had 19% chance of drawing. That was a bonehead move. I obviously didn't draw in that second choice pool. So I was relegated, I would say, to a third choice tag in Wyoming. Now, as a resident of Wyoming, having third choice and second choice opportunities is a huge benefit. It is a huge, huge bonus as a resident. However, even these, like, second and third choice tags can be dang tough sometimes. And this year I really felt that, like, to the maximum. I've hunted. Let's see, I've hunted 1, 2, 3, 4. This is my fifth, second or third choice pronghorn hunt in Wyoming. And let me just tell you, I think this was definitely the hardest. So here's our game plan. At the beginning of the fall, when we had, you know, this hunt on the schedule, I basically was like, you know what, Kane? Let's go shoot a pronghorn for you. Let's try to fill your whitetail doe tags, and then the general deer season will be open in the area. And I can. I can deer hunt or had a cow moose tag. Maybe we can run down and go cow moose hunting. Or maybe there's a place nearby where I have an elk tag. Well, didn't really work out that way. Ended up filling some tags, and then I was relegated to this third choice pronghorn tag. I wasn't all that excited about hunting as my backup. So the main goal here was basically, let's just fill the freezer for Kane, get him a pronghorn, get us a whitetail do, and if we had any extra time, we'd figure something else out to do. All right. That kind of, well, pretty well sets the stage. And on Friday, I picked Kane up from the airport and his flight landed at 11. It took us a few hours to get to his unit, and we were basically glass and pronghorn by 3, 3pm in the afternoon. We I to set the stage a little bit better. I. Going into this hunt, I told Kane, like, dude, you could be done in two hours if you so chose. Like, let's make sure that we take some time, look over some pronghorn and make sure that you kind of get a sense, you know, this being his first pronghorn hunt, kind of get a sense of what's out there and what a big one looks like, what a medium one looks like what a picklehead looks like and fight all these things, right? Like, just get a sense of what's around. Especially for a first time pronghorn hunter, it's important to get an idea of what you're looking at before you just go shoot one and take it home. So we're driving around the unit at 3pm in the afternoon and the first pronghorn we come up to Kane's like, oh, should I shoot that one? I was like, whoa, homie. No, no, no. We're gonna, we're gonna just watch. We're gonna look at pronghorn. We can come back to him tomorrow if it's a really, if it really trips your trigger. I was like, unless it's in the category of oh shitter. And you know, for, for those who don't understand what I'm. What an oh shitter pronghorn is, essentially there's all these, these pronghorn that are out on the landscape that all look pretty, relatively the same pronghorn just kind of like, once they're an adult pronghorn, they kind of all look really similar. Some might hook more, some might be a little goofy, but for the most part they're pretty hard to judge. However, when you come over a hill and you see one that looks like it just got freaking hatchets, it's got baseball bats coming out of its head and with like a hatchet on top of it, like that's when you go, oh, that's a good one. And that's how you know, like, okay, we're talking about a category that maybe we should, we should not be passing on. Now, if you're listening to this and you're a pronghorn aficionado, obviously there's a lot more field judging that can go into it when you're actually playing the inches game. But that's not really my specialty. I like to stay in my lane. And even then, I don't know if my lane is that tight sometimes. But with elk and mule deer. But the point being, we were looking for a good pronghorn to great pronghorn, especially on that first day we were going to look over a bunch of them. And then on day two, three, whatever, we were going to get decreasingly picky, less and less picky as the days went on, just because we knew there were plenty around to be chasing. So we're driving around. We basically covered the vast majority of the accessible ground that was in the unit just in an afternoon drive. Now we still drove around from 3pm till 7pm Right, like so like four hours driving around looking at stuff. I'd get out, throw up the spawning scope and get a sense of what some pronghorn are looking like at a mile, two miles out. And, and you know, as long as none of them were in the ho shitter category we were going to keep driving. So got some good phone scope footage and I actually used capture connect gear to, to get footage through my spotter and was just driving along and, and getting a good inventory of what was around. We did see one that was, that was borderline in that next level category and we kind of got, tried to get a little closer to him. He was on private land and so we threw up a little white flag to try to see if we could increase his interest and see if he would come over onto public and, and he didn't. So that didn't work. And which was probably good because again it was still like the first afternoon the day he got to Wyoming. Funny enough, when we were doing the white flag trick you could see the highway behind us and game warden and a biologist were watching what we were doing. So we walked back to the truck and they checked Kane's license and tags and made sure we were all legal eagle. The important thing was we were not stalking the pronghorn from the right of way. We walked along the right of way with the gun unloaded, crossed the fence, got a good ways away from the road, then loaded the gun and then proceeded the stock like so they were watching, making sure that we were just following the book and you're oftentimes going to get checked especially in a, in a place like Wyoming. I remember small tangent. First year that I ever moved to Wyoming I had non resident pronghorn tag and while I was archery hunting my non resident pronghorn tag in a second choice unit back then I got checked three times in one weekend while I was out hunting. And the guys in, in Wyoming have always been good to me. Maybe it's just because I, you know, I'm trying to be friendly. I don't, I'm not afraid of the wardens and I try to have a good conversation, see how their day's going and just treat them with respect. But yeah, I've had nothing but good experiences with the, the wardens here. And then that was again the case when Kane and I got checked on his pronghorn hunt. Stepping back into the story, we continued on. We kept glassing around and we ended up driving to the part of the unit where we wanted to camp for the Evening. And where we were camping, you could kind of look out one direction into some whitetail looking habitat, and then you can look back the other direction into some pronghorn looking habitat. And essentially our thought was, dude, let's not even worry about going anywhere at first light. Let's get up, let's glass for a whitetail, see if there's something close to camp that we can put a stock on from here. And if there's not, we'll just turn 180 degrees and look at pronghorn country. Maybe there's gonna be a pronghorn for us to stock. So fast forward and the next morning we're drinking coffee. I've got my spotting scope up on the tripod. We're looking at like a river bottom. We're looking behind us at some prairie country. And I didn't see anything in the river bottom, so we didn't have any whitetail to distract us. But as I, as the light got better and I pivoted 180 degrees looking into pronghorn ground. Sure enough, there were two different herds of pronghorn that were within about a mile of us. You could see one was maybe 1200 yards out. The other one was in that 900 to 1000 yard range. Slightly different angles, right? They're far enough apart from one another, they're distinct herds. But two herds behind us and then a group of of does without a buck, where it's also only 600 yards from camp. So I look over the first little group of does that was closer to camp, look over the further ones, and there was an okay buck. Like one that I was like, yeah, like if you wanted to shoot that one, that'd be all right. And I'm like, well, let me check this other herd. I look at that one, I'm like, oh, I think that's the best buck we've seen so far. And it's helpful. Like, we had a big inventory of what we saw the day before. A lot of mediums. And so when you first see like a really good one, you're like, oh, cool. Like that's what that's supposed to look like. And so even though it's only morning of day two, essentially I go, kane, do you want to put a stock down? Like, there's always a chance that a stock doesn't work too. And then we have to go find some more. But you know, we basically have a. We've got a freebie right here. We don't have to drive anywhere. We can just start the stock now. And so we did. Essentially what we were doing is riding up the very center of a, of a deeper sage bottom. And we kept this little ridge between us and the pronghorn. And then once we got to about the 600 yard mark, we had to start belly crawling and trying to get a little closer. And it's kind of funny, as we're belly crawling in the sage brush, we can keep seeing these trucks off to our side, they're kind of behind us, that keep stopping and looking at the pronghorn herd, both the one that was right next to camp and then the one that had the medium sized buck in it. And people just kept driving by those bucks, but they didn't, they couldn't see the herd that we were stalking because they were kind of in another drainage. And again, when you're talking drainage, I mean, it's wide open, but there's just enough of a roll for these pronghorn to be in the bottom. And they could only see these pronghorn if you were standing at our camp that was 1200 yards away or 1000 yards away, whatever it was. So we get to belly crawling and we're belly crawling, dodging the cactus, and sure enough, we get up to where we can kind of see them and, and they pick us off pretty quick. And we're at the further end of, of Kane's effective range, and I'm like, all right, they're onto us, so we gotta, we gotta set up. And luckily, pronghorn, when they're, they'll pick you off, but they don't necessarily, if you're in that further bubble, they don't necessarily just bolt. So we were able to get set up, had him ranged up, dialed them up in the scope, and Kane took his time. We had a rear bag and Bipod was all out on the 65 PRC shooting. 143 ELDXs. It's what I killed my elk with. It's what I killed my deer with. And Kane shoots and absolutely drops that pronghorn. The one thing that was interesting though is obviously he dropped that pronghorn. One great shot that seem to do the trick. And we go walking up there. And unfortunately it was like a spine shot. And when I say spine shot, it wasn't through the spine, it was right below it. So the pronghorn is still kicking. And Kane had to put another round through him to finish him off. But it was just a good reminder. Even when you see, especially when you see them just drop instantly in your scope, it's important not to get all excited and start celebrating it. You got to go make sure that you finish the job. I think I see that happen. It's at least 50, 50 when they drop in their tracks, whether or not you need to put another round in them to, to finish the job or not. Regardless though, Kane got a great goat and we were just pumped. We were so excited. And then I go, well, it's morning of day. It's really the first morning. But morning of day two, like now what do you want to do? And he goes, well, let's just take our time. We went back to camp and I caped it out. He wants to get it mounted. And while I was caping it out, he was making some heart and we had fried heart in the cast iron for lunch and a bunch of eggs and stuff. It was awesome. It was just really enjoyable low key camp life. The pack out was like 400 yards or something where you could drive it to a two track. So easy, easy on that first pronghorn. So that evening we went out glassing for whitetails, which I think a lot of you guys might think is either one kind of boring because you have a bunch of whitetails or two kind of weird because we're glassing for them. But that's one of my favorite parts about western whitetail hunting is you get the opportunity to glass for them and pick apart creek bottoms and look in willows and look at the edges of hay meadows where you have access and try to find, find whitetails in the glass. None of this tree stand blind type stuff, though I will say it's probably more effective if you do figure out how to hunt whitetails in the west like eastern folks do for people with short amounts of time to get dedicated to it and like who are just looking for a doe. I think spot and stock whitetail hunting is very good and it's super. It's super fun too because again it's more relaxed. You're not like in this big backcountry mode most of the time unless you're in Idaho or northwest Montana. But for the most part you're basically just checking stuff that's pretty close to a road and you gotta try to find some, find some meat for the freezer. So that first night we didn't find anything. We hadn't seen anything that morning either. We didn't see anything the first night. So we're driving back to the truck and, and we noticed two whitetail run across the road in front of us. And I look on onyx as we're driving by, and I'm like, sure enough, they just walked into some state land. So we get pumped. We're like, heck, yeah, we know right where we want to be in the morning. That night, a gnarly storm blew in. So I was staying in my little camper trailer. It's like a queen bed inside of an enclosed trailer. And then I've got a little kitchen off the back of it. We call it the Taj Mah Small because it's. It's a pretty little trailer, but it is really comfortable living. So I was staying in there. I set up the Argali Absuroka for Kane to stay in with a cot. When you don't put the liner in there, you can run a short cot and then have a nice, comfortable sleeping arrangement in there. So I'm sitting in there in the Taj Mah Small, and I hear the wind start picking up. And I look at the. The. Before we went to bed, I looked at the forecast. It said winds gusts up to about 20 miles an hour, which is windy, but it's not unbearable. And so we're. We're in the middle of the night, we're sleeping, and I get woken up by the wind, and I'm kind of lying awake, like, tossing and turning while the wind is kind of shaking my little enclosed trailer. And I'm kind of worried about Kane. Like, he's in my little tent. It's not really little, but he's in the Absaroka. And I'm like, man, I wonder how he's doing in there. It's probably loud as heck. I gave him, like, earplugs before going to bed because I told him it was probably going to be windy enough, you needed earplugs to go to sleep. And then I would just wake us both up in the morning. So it's about 2am And I get a text message. It says, hey, dude, are you up? And I was like, yeah, this wind is messed up. And he goes, okay, I'm going to go into the truck. And I was like, yeah, that's a good idea. So I jump out of the. My little cargo trailer and I run out there and we collapse his tent. He's got a crazy video of him holding onto the center pole because he's getting nervous that the wind's going to blow it away. And we lay that thing. We pull the center pole out, we put some gear on top of it, and then Kane jumps in the passenger side of the pickup and lays the. The reclined seat back and goes to sleep for the rest of the night. I end up putting earplugs in so I could sleep inside the camper. And we slept through the night. And then my alarm still woke me up through the earplugs, thank goodness. But that next morning, we wake up and the wind is just absolutely howling. It is like, as my friend Trent says, it was going mock chicken. It was next level. And so we're like, boy, this is not looking good, but let's go hunt. That section where we saw the whitetails go into that that night prior. So we get in there in the dark and we're sneaking into kind of like where we need to be, and we're letting it get light, and it is just windy, windy, windy. Especially the. The interesting thing is the wind is coming from the southwest and the sun obviously rises in the east. So all of the spots where there's shade where you would expect, like, once the sun comes up for deer to kind of linger, man, it's just in the wind tunnel. And we're just like, kind of creeping along slowly, still hunting and glassing these. These big fields that are on state land. And just to also add a piece of information about that. So in Wyoming, you can hunt state land as long as it's not cultivated. So what we ended up with here are big meadows and a river bottom that's not cultivated. And that allows them to be accessible. As soon as you add irrigation and you add row crops, that kind of thing, then they're not accessible for hunting, though you can be on the state land around it. It's a really weird gray area, and I highly recommend everyone just kind of read up on it and try to get a sense for specific scenarios. Onyx and the or the Wyoming State Land and Investments Board, both have cultivated state lands, like, kind of marked out as inaccessible on their website, but it's worth looking into. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I think it's important because I was talking about us hunting state land in a river bottom. And just the differences are if it's cultivated, it's not accessible. If it's not cultivated, state land is accessible. You just cannot camp on state land in Wyoming. What's up, everybody? Sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a brief story to tell you. Back in 2019, I met Brad Brooks of Argali when I was on a boot testing project with him for a different company. It was then I got to learn that Brad's attention to detail creates some of the best backcountry products There is. I also just freaking like the guy. So I ended up running a bunch of his gear for the next handful of years. Then this summer when he came out with the clothing project, I jumped all over my chance to wear it like a rat on freaking cheese. So now I'm telling you about this project because I've had the chance to spend all fall in his vesper pants, Torx pants and guide air fleece. I especially like the Vesper pants. They're my favorite pant that I've ever worn. So far this stuff is just fine tuned for exactly what backcountry hunters in the west need. So if you want more information, be sure to sign up for his email list at the show notes or argali outdoors.com that way you'll get early access to behind the scenes updates, insights from testers in the field like me, and you'll find out when you can actually get your hands on some of this gear later this winter. All right, that's all I have for you today. Let's get back to the show Foreign you're listening to the Hunt west podcast. So we spend most of the morning out there looking for whitetail. We don't see hide nor hair of a whitetail and the wind is picking up. I look and I look at the NOAA weather forecast. The wind was increasing to 60 mile an hour gusts that day. And I go holy crap Kane. And it's gonna last the entire of the day and then it's still gonna be windy the next day. So I says, what do you think about us taking a drive? We can go up to my pronghorn unit. And I think that they had I told them I think they have unlimited whitetail tags nearby or even just leftover whitetail tags nearby up there. So you can add some whitetail tags and we can hunt whitetails in the morning and evening still. And we can hunt my pronghorn middle of the day. Gives us stuff to do all day long. Just to clarify, when I said extra whitetail tags, those are just doe tags. They're a type 8 license in Wyoming and they allow you to just take any white tailed doe or fawn. So that's what you're looking for when you're looking at the tag types for that opportunity. So we run north. Boy, it's four hours total or three hours from the time we left our first pronghorn camp to get to the second area. And obviously it's mid afternoon and our game plan there is basically just let's drive around the pronghorn area and get it figured out and then end up at a place where we can glass some whitetail habitat and try to see if we can pick up a whitetail chase for the following morning. The idea there was we're going to sit back far enough from the river bottoms to essentially see whitetail and kind of see where they were at, but obviously not be able to to make a move unless they came out real early. We just wanted to get a sense of where some were on the pronghorn side of things. We wanted to get a sense of how the roads were laid out and how the unit lays out for as far as access is concerned, where hunter pressure is, where it wasn't that kind of thing. So my pronghorn unit has a total of 14% public lands. You probably could go look it up and figure out which one this is. But back in 2019, kind of what I was talking about when I was first a resident in Wyoming, it was a leftover for non residents. Now it takes two preference points. 14% public land is less public land than the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Minnesota, and New Jersey. So if you're familiar with any of those states, I just rattled off this unit that we're hunting for pronghorn has less public land than those states. And just from talking to people who hunt whitetails in those places, they kind of know how public land can get just beaten up when you've got that little amount of it. I knew that going into our pronghorn hunt, and I just wasn't expecting to find anything very special. But I wanted to get a nice buck. And furthermore, I was going to share this buck with Kane. I've had the great fortune of filling my freezer and even had to get another freezer so that we could hold enough meat for some wedding plans I have coming up. But I was like, yeah, dude, if I shoot a pronghorn, like, you can totally take some of the meat home. So we're gonna go find us a pronghorn. I didn't necessarily want to shoot like a yearling, but anything that was an adult, adult pronghorn buck was probably going to get it. Boy, we drove around that full first day and did not see a pronghorn buck on public land. We did find one really cool looking, really big buck. I'm gonna have a little clip of it on my Instagram at some point, so might be worth checking if you want to see it. But obviously he was square in the middle of private and there's goats all over on the private land. So it was definitely like, okay, well they're not hurting for pronghorn numbers, but they are hurting for pronghorn access. They give out a ton of tags in this unit. So all of the accessible areas, you could literally glass up pronghorn carcasses that people had killed in earlier in the week or the week prior. And it was pretty discouraging. So we put a ton of miles on my pickup that day. We were just driving the unit and then we ended up at a spot where we could glass. And it just so happened. My buddy Hayden and, and his wife Maddie. Hayden's been on this podcast as a guest. He's one of my best hunting buddies. Him and his wife were camping out, doing some deer hunting, trying to get her a mule deer, her first mule deer. And so we ended up the night not too far from those guys, hoping to meet up with them afterwards or hoping to be around for a pack out. And we glassed the river bottom. Didn't see a whitetail that night. And we also didn't see any pronghorn on public land that night. So we're kind of getting our butts kicked this first day. The next day we get up and we've got a 45 minute drive to this part of the creek bottom that I thought, you know, a river bottom, I thought looked like great whitetail habitat. And upon our inspection, it did look like excellent whitetail habitat. Awesome oxbows in the river that had know, stellar cottonwood stands. And it just looked like something you'd see out of like a, a whitetail magazine with all the cottonwoods and all their leaves turning a big river going right through it. The one thing it was missing though was agriculture that was anywhere closer than two miles away. There was agriculture further down and further up the river, but there wasn't anything right there that said it looks like just a great place to recover and a great place for whitetails to be hanging out. And unfortunately we were disappointed not finding any whitetails that next morning. So then we went into pronghorn hunting mode. And as we're kind of glassing and trying to see if we can find some, we're glassing big, big country. I did find a group of pronghorn that I couldn't tell if they're on public or not, but they were, they were kind of in the vicinity of some public and that was like a big drive to get up and around to, to, to get to them. I didn't even know if there was a buck in there. They Were like six miles away, and it just stuck out like a sore thumb in the morning sun. So we were getting ready to drive around to go chase those and see if they were, you know, get close enough to see if they were on public. And as we're driving around, I get a text from Hayden that says his wife Maddie had shot a mule deer. So we were. We were stoked. I was stoked to go help him out. And Kane unfortunately broke his darn cell phone somehow, essentially, it died and then didn't turn back on, so he needed to go to the Verizon store. So we drove around, dropped me off, and then Kane went to town to get his phone fixed or attempt to get his phone fixed, and I hiked in to help out with the packout. Maddie and Hayden totally could have handled the mule deer pack out by themselves, but I always loved being part of those things. And those two helped me on my moose hunt, which you heard about earlier in the fall. Hayden was. He's been there on a lot of different hunts of mine that he's helped me out on packouts. So I was just happy to try to repay the favor just a little bit. She shot an awesome four point with eye guards, her first mule deer. Hayden, me, and Kane all made the remark that her first mule deer was three times the size of any of the three of our first mule deer. And she did a great job. Just a natural hunter. And it's really cool that she's had some really good success here on. On her first couple seasons getting into hunting. Anyway, we had a brief intermission, then to break to pack out the mule deer. Kane went to town, and by the time we got back to the truck again, we made a great lunch of some heart sandwiches that we had from her mule deer buck. And then we went to pronghorn hunting. Maddie and Hayden wanted to go, too, so we just hopped in one truck, and the four of us were mobbing around looking for pronghorn. And basically from I think it was about 3pm until dark, we covered a bunch, a bunch of miles, both with our eyes and with our pickup. We didn't end up hiking that much, mostly because you could glass so much country. You get on some of these main ridges, you can see for miles, and you'd end up with a longer stock that day. But if you did see them in these deeper flat spots, these deeper, you know, parts that were good pronghorn habitat, but unfortunately just nothing that was in anything accessible. As we were headed back out, we drove by this little section off of a main highway and kind of looked back up in there, and all we saw was like a flash of a pronghorn back in this draw. So I was like, oh, okay, I think we got something on, you know, we got something on deck here. So we drive past it, turn around and go back towards the section. And they drop me out and I run up the hill and I realize these pronghorn, ah, they're probably 7, 800 yards from the road. And I'm trying to like, kind of sneak over the ridge, Just peek up my head just a little bit at a time, Peek it up a little bit at a time. I peek it up one time, and they're right there staring at me. I'm like, holy crap. So they're like, it's 70 yards, like almost archery range. And I'm looking through these pronghorn and I see like, do, do, do, do. And I put on my binos. I'm like, oh, that one's actually a buck. But it was really hard to tell he was a buck. He was just a yearling, you know, buck pronghorn. And like I was telling those guys in Nevada, they have these tags that are pronghorn shorter than with horns, shorter than ears, prong horn with horns longer than ears. And he would not have been legal in Nevada. So I ended up electing to pass, even though he was actually on public land. But I just was like, man don't need to just shoot a pronghorn that bad. Hopefully we can get Kane a white tail doe or find a different pronghorn, like an adult buck for him to take home some meat. So I'm just going to. I'm just going to pass. And we had spent enough time messing around with pronghorn that evening. We didn't get any time to whitetail hunt, which was kind of a bummer, but that's what we did anyway. So the next morning. The next morning Kane and I were off by ourselves. Maddie and Hayden went home to butcher the their mule deer. And they had some stuff they needed to do. So back to just Kane and I, and we went to some of these places where we'd seen pronghorn kind of on the border, and we elected to go do a hike back in there. So we hiked like two miles back into some public that didn't have any roads, trying to get back around some private boundaries that we had seen pronghorn on, see if anything had trickled off. And it's one of those things where when I've done a handful of these hunts where you know that the pronghorn drift through public and they come onto public, especially when there's less pressure and you're just hoping that something's getting bold enough to come back through public ground. And as you're hiking, you can see pronghorn tracks, like, in saddles in between little ridges or along the bottoms where it's just easier walking in this, like, washed out cool. And you're like, God, there's just. There's gotta be one out here. And you just consistently don't find pronghorn. It is really, really discouraging. You're like, gosh. And especially when you can see a bunch of them on private, you're like, I know there's enough of them in here that one could make a slip up. But I gotta say, after that morning hunt, we hunted really hard. You know, added in a big, long hike, we covered a bunch of country with our. Our optics and our pickup, again, that big, did a huge loop in the pickup again. And I was basically feeling like this might be the tag that goes unpunched, the pronghorn tag. You know, when you think about western big game hunting, you usually think of the pronghorn are the easiest ones to get. And, you know, on day three of my hunt, I was just pretty much thinking it wasn't going to happen. We essentially were talking about we still had to go back to town and check in on Verizon. That's a different story. But we drove into town, basically do a little bit of a reset. And then we looked at the map and said, okay, we're up here on this part of the unit. Let's go to the complete opposite end of the unit, which we'd been in two days prior, and let's go check something out down there, see if any pronghorn are on public there. And I knew of a good whitetail spot that was nearby so we could go hunt that for the afternoon for pronghorn and then hit this whitetail spot. Keep in mind, it's like an hour and a half drive from our camp to the pronghorn spot. It's not close. So we get in the truck and we get there by early afternoon, 1 o' clock or so. And as we're, like coming around the first corner where there's some public land to hunt, I look out the window and there's some pronghorn not too far off the road, just on private land, but next to the public. And I'm like, oh, man, that's good. So we drive Past, we just keep driving, acting like nothing's, you know, abnormal. And we take this road to get back up into this stretch of some parcels of public land that you could hunt. We get behind a hill and pull off the road and start looking at onyx. We realize as we're looking at onyx, these Pronghorn are probably 500 yards from a water hole. The water hole is on public, and it is about 70 degrees. It's a little bit breezy, and it's just classic hot Wyoming in October. So it's just freaking dry, too. So we take a gamble and we say, what are the odds that those pronghorn are going to go to water soon? We basically just were like, well, what else we got to do? And we set a time limit. I. I say it was 3 o', clock, maybe it was 4 o', clock, I don't know. We have some disagreements about what time we were gonna stop pronghorn hunting and go whitetail hunt. But essentially we're like, we're gonna burn the rest of our afternoon here watching this pronghorn waterhole. We know there's some nearby. We can sneak up to the water hole, just lay there in the. In the sage brush, and then just hope for something to come by. It's the first time I've ever done, like, an ambush style in rifle season. Most of the time it's just pure spot and stock, and you don't even think about sitting water with a rifle. But here we are, no other options, really, and that's what we committed to. So we park almost exactly a mile from where we wanted to glass the water hole. The water hole was in this tight, tight coulee, so you had to, like, be right on top of it to see it. And we drop into the coulee, you know, make our way snaking down these little drainages until we get to the ridge with the water hole, belly crawl up and over the top, and we're laying their glass in, and I'm looking at where the pronghorn had been, and they're not there. And I'm like, ah, dang it. Maybe they moved off and, like, are deeper into private. We're sitting there kind of thinking about, like, well, I'll just wait, maybe something else will come by. And as we're sitting there waiting, and we're waiting, it probably wasn't more than a couple minutes. All of a sudden, I look to my left, and standing there staring at us is the herd of pronghorn. In this herd, there was two bucks One that was like a yearling, and then one that was a two year old, which I found out later. And in this herd, there was, you know, half dozen or a dozen does also. And I'm looking at these pronghorn, and they're looking at us, and I'm like, oh, boy. I don't. What are we gonna do now? They're standing, like, even further on, private. So I get my sweatshirt out, and I turn it inside out, and it's got, like, a white lining on the inside. It's literally just a Walmart sweatshirt, not a fancy high tech one. I'm like, kane, wave this in the air. So Kane's laying next to me, and he starts waving my. My sweatshirt in the air. My white sweatshirt. Because they're staring at us already, and those pronghorn look at it, and then they start running across the drainage in front of us. I'm like, wait, wait, keep doing that. And they start running, like, closer to us, but they're across the valley from us. And I'm like, wait, this is exactly where they're. They should be going. And so they run across the valley. Run across the valley. And then I'm like, okay, wait, wait, stop. And they stop, and I range. I dial up, and I'm like, kane, you on him? He's like, yep. He's watching in his binos. I'm like, okay, taking the shot. And we're laying on our bellies prone. I've got my bipod up, I got my little rear back, and shoot once. Boom. And I see that buck pick his front leg up, takes a couple steps, and then he just tips right over. It was freaking awesome. I think, you know, of the hunts that I've done this year, that one was one of the most mentally challenging. The. The moose. After I shot the moose and then was looking for it again, that was also mentally challenging, but not for the same reasons. This one was like, I feel like I. I can't. You know, when. When you just don't have animals that you're chasing on public land or on accessible ground, you just feel like there's nothing that you can do to increase your odds. You're like, we've hiked all over. We drove all over. We've glassed all over. Like, I don't know what else we can do. So then when it all comes together, it's just like, holy cow, this is so relieving. And, like, with such a big sense of accomplishment. And each hunt's different. It's got its own challenges. But, boy, that one was a really mentally challenging one. You already heard the stories of some physically challenging ones, like the backcountry mule deer hunt or the backcountry elk hunt. Like, those had their own separate challenges that were unique, right? But this one was just a mental fricking grind. And granted, you put this into, like, deer terms or elk terms, it's only three days, it's not that long. But Kane was here for five days total, and the first two days were spent hunting for his pronghorn. So. And granted, we had some little intermissions and things that, you know, we weren't hunting, you know, dawn to dusk for pronghorns exclusively each day. It just was a lot of effort and we covered a ton of miles from, burned a lot of gasoline to only find really one adult pronghorn buck on public land in that much time. So it was awesome. We were able to get that pronghorn worked up. Kane hiked back to the truck, the mile and change, you know, he took a little bit of a smoother sailing route, but it was a little further. He hiked back to the truck, brought it around closer, and it was only a couple hundred yard hike to the road to get that pronghorn out. Boy, it was just a huge relief. And so that evening, just to clear up and wrap up the story of the this hunt with Kane and Jaden, we went to the spot that I had, like, identified, probably a good whitetail spot. There's some agriculture, there's some thick river bottom. This is kind of my, my Hail Mary spot for whitetail, for Cain. So we sneak in there, we cross this river, and we're sitting there waiting and looking and glassing in this, like, cottonwood bottom. We're not seeing anything, not seeing anything, not seeing anything. And then I look on the map and I'm like, man, maybe I should just peek over at the edge of this field that we're sitting next to. The field's in private, but we're sitting, you know, back off of it in public in the COVID waiting for something to stand up and head, head towards the field. Let me go check this field real quick. I told Kane. So I like, sneak over to the edge of the know the quote unquote field that we see from the aerial footage. And it's dry ground. There is no crops out there. And I'm like, oh, no, that's not. There's literally no attractive for him. Like, we're just watching cottonwoods, just dry cottonwoods. And I feel like after having done that, the Day before, I was like, this is probably not going to be successful. So I came back to Canyon and I was like, yo, we need to bounce back across the river and go check an even smaller portion of this, you know, area. But it's got a field that they could be leaving from and going to. So it's prime time right now. So we're like, we're not on time to be doing this move, but here we are. This is what we have going on. Anyway, so we cross the river again and we sneak over to this area and we're like slowly moving up. We see some mule deer does out in the field and we're like, okay, their deer are up already. We get closer, we get closer and sure enough, we hear the. The dreaded, the. The snort, wheeze, whatever it's called. These whitetail guys know the sound of a deer picking you off. And sure enough, there was a whitetail doe standing right where we were trying to get to. It jumps into the tree line and we're like, oh, well, let's get ready. And it jumps back out and then it just takes off across the field. We're like, oh, man, we blew it. So luckily we ended up with a pronghorn to split between Kane and I, and Kane got a pronghorn, so he ended up packing his coolers full and taking them back home with him. And I'm just so stoked. It was, it was a highs and lows trip. Kane's pronghorn was pretty much all high, adding in a little bit of whitetail doe hunting. Lots of lows there. My, my pronghorn hunt was basically a bunch of lows until it wasn't. And it was just a fun adventure with a good old friend. So appreciate Kane for making the trip out and just doing this hunt with me. It was super fun. And, you know, we've been, like I said at the top of the podcast, we've been making little hunt memories for like 25 years now. So it's fun to keep adding to that catalog with him. So I was telling you, I think Kane might have messed up a little bit on his packing meat home. Essentially, he ended up with one big cooler that he wanted to put the meat in. And anything over £70 is, is, you know, they charge $200. So we get up there and we didn't. Oh, yeah, Kane's phone's still broken. We didn't look up any of his flight specific details. And while granted, I could have looked it up on my phone, we just didn't Right. We show up at the front counter, we have this cooler all nicely wrapped up that he just bought. And it's got ice and meat in there, and it's put it on the scale. Him and I carry it up, put it on the scale. It's £120. And the gal's like, oh, we can't take coolers that are over £100. And we're like, oh, no. Then she tells us like, but if you make it 70 pounds, if you make it under 70 pounds, it's $100 extra weight fee. If it's over 70 pounds, it's a 200 extra bag fee. We're like, okay. So we run out to the truck, and luckily I had one little cooler in the truck. And so we cut it apart, cut the tape apart, the tape job that we just spent so much time on to send him home with me. We cut the tape apart, put it into my extra cooler, tape that up, tape his back up. Then we walk in there, and he was trying to make this earlier flight. It wasn't the flight that he had scheduled, but he was trying to get out on the, you know, one at 3:00 clock instead of 6:00pm and they, they require that you check in 45 minutes prior to your flight taking off in this little airport. So we get back in there with like two minutes to spare for him to check in these. These coolers. And his first one was like £60. You know, it's got, it's got some meat and, but ice. And he put some gear in his coolers too, just to make it easier to pack home. And it was £60. We're like, awesome. The first one, good to go, he only has $100 extra fee. Next one, he put up £76. So, so with. With all of the ice and his extra gear and the meat also in there, he was overweight. And so he ended up having to pay a $200 extra fee. So this is a really good lesson. If anyone's traveling to do some hunting with flights, I would somehow try to find a ha. Trying to find a way to bring a scale with you so you can stay underneath those weight measurements at the airport. Kane Basically, it cost him $100 that he was £8 over or whatever. So that was expensive. I did remind him that it was, you know, $300 extra. But, you know, with 120 pounds or whatever, I don't think it was that much meat because he put so much gear and ice and stuff in there. But he still made out better. Than Burger Koss at, at the store. So, no, no, no, do not factor in the gas and the, the flights and the tags and all that stuff. He's definitely in the hole big time on his meat. His meat cost. But it's always fun when you can go on a vacation, have a good time with a friend, and still bring home some meat for the freezer when you're doing these travel adventure hunts. So it's more just like a bonus, you know, you get a kind of recoup or not spend a little bit of money on meat. And it's certainly, you know, it's an integral part of these hunts. But, gosh, if it was all just for, you know, saving money on meat in the, in the freezer, you'd have to do things very differently than flying to come out to Wyoming and, and shoot a couple pronghorn or shoot a pronghorn and then take part of a pronghorn home from a friend. So that's our Pronghorn 2025 story. I hope you all, you know, learned a little bit of the lay of the land for how pronghorn hunts shake out in Wyoming. We're talking mostly low point, right? Like we're talking five points or less to go on these hunts that Kane and I did. I guess that one, it takes six points now in the regular draw, but it'll be less than that in the special. The special draw, if you didn't know, it's $1,200 tag instead of a $370 tag. So it's almost four times the price. And you get better odds because there's just fewer people doing it. So it is worth looking in if you want to do that. But at some level, too, it might be just cheap enough to pay for an outfitter guide or pay for a trespass fee, then go for the special. You're gonna have to weigh out these things just person to person. Depends on what you're looking for out of a hunt. But once we get into the full fledged application season, it'll be a good time to dive in deeper into that later on on some dedicated podcasts about the different state systems and how you can make them work for you, not just take what everybody else is doing and do that. So stay tuned. Those will come more in the winter time when the fall hunting seasons are wrapped up and we're done with stories. All right, looking to the end of October, we've got elk and deer hunting that is still just in the thick of things. I've got a lot of guys who are out in Colorado doing some first season rifle elk hunts right now. I'm excited to hopefully have some stories from Hunt west clients and friends who are down there. And I'm really excited to hear how those hunts go because I think they can be one of the most enjoyable opportunities. It's been pretty crummy weather, which can sometimes make for good elk hunting weather. But looking towards the end of October, if you're hunting in any place like Montana, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, obviously be thinking about with your elk hunting opportunity, how you can find places that are not getting hit hard by hunter pressure and hidey holes where bulls will be broken off from the herds. They're, they're pretty well done running by the time you hear this thing. And granted someone's gonna hear a bull bugle or see a bull in a herd and like losing their stuff. That's a lot more common in some limited quota areas and some really highly sought after tags. From here on out though, just expect to be looking for lone bulls, bachelor groups of bulls, and you're going to be working hard to get away from other hunter pressure. If you're looking for a cow, obviously that changes. We did a whole cow hunting episode a couple weeks back. So go reference that if you're looking for a cow, elk or just any elk, I guess on an, any elk tag. But again, just keep in mind, you know, weather is your friend. It gets animals up on their feet this time of year because otherwise they're just hunkered down. Bulls are going to be recovering from the rut. Deer are going to be staging, but not really rutting for the next couple of weeks. And the mule deer, especially mature mule deer bucks, are going to be pretty tough to find unless you get good weather for you mule deer hunters out there. I would love to hear how it goes these next couple weeks as well. If you guys start seeing some running activity a little early, let me know. I'd love to, to hear about these field adventures from, you know, anybody who's listening. But coming up on the 23rd, 24th, I'm going to be heading out to my next guided client hunt. So I've got a guy coming in and we're going to be hunting mule deer in a high point unit in Wyoming, which is going to be super fun. There's a lot of deer to look at, but I'm, I, I'm not so sure that we're going to be necessarily looking over a bunch of giants. It's going to be one. I think that's going to take a bit of grinding and a bit of bit of creativity. The hunt's been going on already, so it's going to take some creativity to find some bucks that haven't been messed with in some older age class that haven't been shot from the easy spots. So wish us luck on that one. All right everybody, that's it for this episode this week. I hope that you all have a ton of fun out there hunting. If you're getting ready to plan for 2026 already, you already know, hit me up and we can get something started. But good luck out there to everybody else who's still hitting the woods, whether it's for western elk, mule deer, pronghorn or eastern whitetails. Like, I know a lot of those seasons are coming up, so keep us posted and stay safe out there. We'll talk to you guys on the next episode. Thank you for listening to the Hunt podcast. If you like what you heard today, the best compliment you can give is to share the show with a friend. We will see you on the next episode and we hope one day to see you. Hunt west. Oh shoot, you're still here. Well, while I got you, here's how Hunt west services work. If you want to use your points or random applications wisely, you can hire me for a tag application strategy session. If you want to learn how to escout and create a kickass hunt plan, bring me on for a Hunt west session. If you want your hunt planning done for you but can't afford a guided hunt, let's create a week long hunt plan together using the most recent intel and fully fleshed out battle plan I can create with you. This includes hunt itineraries, onyx pins and gear lists. You can find more information about all these services@huntwestplanning.com okay, carry on with your yard work or laundry or whatever you're doing to pass the time. 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